Floating Through the Noise: Levitation Recap

Ethan McConnell

Local Music Director

In the city of Austin, live music is a huge staple in the community. When down there there’s an event for almost everyone to enjoy. With events like Free Week, SXSW, and ACL it’s hard to not enjoy the scene. Now with all those bigger events I’d like to bring all you lovely listeners to talk about one of my personal favorite festivals to regularly attend. Levitation isn’t as old as SXSW but still holds a tight-knit community for those that come for it. It has evolved in so many ways and to see it at the status it’s in now made it more amusing. I’ve always gone to Levitation fest for a few shows here and there and walked tirelessly through downtown Austin, but this year I had the wonderful opportunity to experience it for the full three days all in one location.  

Castle Rat 

This was the very first band that played as soon as the gates opened and I went in totally blind. Here I’m thinking this will be some calm band to try to get festival goers feet wet nothing too crazy can happen. Here to prove me wrong was New York based band Castle Rat with a blend of fantasy storytelling with heavy metal music to convey it. With buzzing guitar riffs and angelic vocal lines, it made me feel like I was playing a session of DND especially with their track, “WIZARD”. To top it off you had your usual metal guitar solos with a whole lot of whammy pedal being used. It felt like your standard metal song but with the added theatrics telling a story it created something entirely new and entertaining for the first act of the day.  

Blonde Redhead 

This American alternative rock ban is always keeping listeners on their toes constantly evolving their sound. Blonde Redhead leaves very big shoes to fill being one of the early bands to pioneer the genre of shoegaze and dream pop. You have dream-like melodies woven together with contrasting vocals such as Kazu Makino’s breathy and fragile lines and Amedeo Pace’s more grounding and husky presence. To add on top of this you have the mix of two very distinct music backgrounds collided as one with this amazing result of European and Japanese Avant Garde. You have structures of a rock song walking the fine lines of fragile beauty and dissonant unease. With their set they played tracks like “Snowman” and “Elephant Woman” keeping a real somber tone as they always execute perfectly. It was great to see them live and would recommend if you haven’t listened to them to start now with the album Misery Is a Butterfly. 

A Place To Bury Strangers 

When I say this is the loudest band I have ever heard, I am not overexaggerating. I had earplugs in the whole weekend at the festival and when I was there for this band, everything was vibrating (but in a good way). A Place To Bury Strangers is a band I would categorize as noise rock. The pedals they were using sounding like reverb, big muff, looper, and distortion all roll into one. The guitar was quite literally barking at me with all the noise generating from it along with the tight punchy drums and consistent bass thumping. The music was matched so well with the musician’s stage presence with frontman Oliver Ackerman taking his half sawed off guitar and throwing it in the air or jamming an LED light into the neck of the guitar. It doesn’t stop there either; you had the full band take their instruments and walk out to the middle of the crowd and kept the chaos going. When you hear their track, “Disgust” it just wakes something up inside of you forget a red bull. The three members in this band bring the noise of a whole stadium and play like rent is due in the next thirty minutes.